Orange County Buddhist Church
Orange County Buddhist Church
You can’t know how happy
Happy New
Year’s is, until you
See Death
come knocking.
Or true, real
Life.
Akemashite omedetoo gozaimasu. Sakunen-chuu wa iro-iro to osewa ni narimashita. Kotoshi mo mata doozo yoroshiku onegai-mooshiagemasu. Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you all for all that you did for m my family and me last year. Please continue to favor us this year as well.
Every year has become one which I can truly congratulate myself for meeting. There is nothing particularly special about it, only the fact that it and I have coincided and are one in time. Dogen’s being-time still holds true. (That sounds as if I knew what Dogen really meant! Ha! But I do believe in his teaching, being is time; time, being.) On the other hand, as I write this, I have not yet met the new year, 2005, so congratulating myself right now might be a little premature. I certainly hope not, and I certainly hope to see you all at our New Year’s Day service or on Sunday, January 2nd, at the first regular service of the New Year, although you might not get this until afterwards. In any case, I hope we are all healthy during 2005, and beyond, for that matter.
As important as our health (both physical and psychological) is, it is just as important, if not more so, to know whom this healthy being is. When we are of Dharma school age, it is perhaps more important to learn those things, such as the Eightfold Noble Path, that tend to socialize us, i.e., make us acceptable as members of a society rather than the anarchic beings we begin our lives as. As we grow older and, if we’re fortunate enough to meet good teachers along the way, wiser, we find that perhaps the Eightfold Noble Path ion fact tends to selfishness, especially if we do not practice the requisite things taught therein. It does that because the emphasis is on individual enlightenment. In a sense, it requires us to become supremely selfish to break out of self.
The Mahayana teachings, of which we believe Jodo Shinshu is the culmination, ask us to practice the way of the bodhisattva, in which we postpone our own enlightenment so that we might show others the way to the 18th Vow, which enables us to become one in Amida, our enlightenment, sometimes expressed as Oneness, enables us, through Amida, to lead all other sentient beings to the same enlightenment. Jodo Shinshu, as with all Mahayana schools, teaches that our enlightenment depends on the enlightenment of all beings. In the so-called secular world, we might say that our happiness depends on the happiness of all beings, which means that trying to benefit others, in whatever way we can, is the primary way in which we can benefit ourselves.
As we begin the New Year, I hope that we will all contemplate on this and do what we can to benefit ourselves.
Gassho,
Dull-Rooted Jaan,
Rev. John Doami
